Afterwords from Miss Gladys Cailiff Written by Her on the Occasion of the 72nd Annual Baghdad Bazaar
EVERY SPRING for more than seventy years now, the people of Baghdad, Georgia, have been rolling out the minaret, nailing up the arches, and touching up the paint and plaster in preparation for our annual bazaar. All that time, I thought folks knew what it was that we were doing every spring. I thought most everybody understood what it was about. This past year, however, some folks got a notion that we ought to change the name of our town back to what it used to be. When the subject came up at the January breakfast meeting of the Baghdad GA Chamber of Commerce, my brother Force looked at the business community sitting around the tables and booths in the Arctic Circle, and he said, “Then what are we going to have, come June? The Threestep Bazaar? What do Arabian Nights got to do with a place called Threestep, Georgia?”
“Maybe the whole Arabian deal is not such a good idea anymore, Uncle Force,” said our grandnephew Sam, who is currently president of the Baghdad GA Chamber of Commerce, the members of which seemed inclined to agree that it might be wise to change things up a bit. “Maybe have us a music fest instead of a bazaar,” one of them actually said.
When we told former bazaar coordinator Mavis Davis Bonner all of the above, she poked her bony finger at me (heedless of the IV attached to her arm and all her monitors beeping) and she said, “You got to tell the story, Gladys. That’s the only way to stop ’em. And I mean the real story, the whole story.”
I am not a natural-born storyteller like my sister May, but I have done my best.
That said, I can tell you there are more Spiveys, Cailiffs, Gordons, Lumpkins, Peacocks, Boykins, and McCombs in the state of Georgia today than you can shake a stick at. Just to give you some idea, I have heard from five different Ms. Spiveys currently or formerly in the field of education, and the number of Gordons who happen to be lawyers—or have great-granddaddies who were lawyers—are legion. (Some of them really are descendants of General John B. Gordon of the ex-Confederate armies, the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.) Not only that, pretty much everybody who lives on certain sea islands off the Georgia coast has a person by the name of Bilali—though spelled in a variety of ways—on their family tree. My great-grandnephew little Sam set me up with email, and for weeks I went around telling folks my address was GladysCailiff@yoohoo.com, but it looks like everybody found me just the same.
I am happy to report that most people are satisfied with sending a note or an angry email if they don’t like something they read.
I am even happier to report that I have received many messages of support, the most surprising of which was an email from an engineer in Saudi Arabia who thanked me for confirming the cockamamie story his grandmother used to tell them about living on a secret island in America when she was a little girl—they all thought it was the dementia talking. Along those same lines, a fellow from the International Institute for Truth in History told me how surprised he was to “see in print an account, however oblique, of the intelligence debacle behind one botched attempt (of many) to rescue British troops besieged at Kut.”
As for the most frequently asked question, the answer is that Theo Boykin’s priceless copy of the Kitab al-Hiyal was donated—or repatriated, as my niece would say—to the historical archives of Baghdad University about a year after Theo’s death, which was as soon as his mother could part with it. As near as we can tell, that Kitab disappeared in the widespread looting that followed the bombing of Baghdad in 2003.
Sir Richard F. Burton’s ten volumes of The Arabian Nights I kept for myself—a fact still remembered (fondly, I hope) by former fifth-graders from Joel Chandler Harris Elementary School in Claytonville, where I started teaching in the 1950s and kept on right through the thrown eggs (and worse) of the 1960s, and for another twenty-seven years after that. Mavis still has Miss Spivey’s typewriter.
Etta George was the first woman from Piedmont County ever to earn an M.D. degree. She moved to Atlanta but comes home most years for the Baghdad Bazaar.
And yes, Eugene did become an actor. Out of consideration for his privacy, I have refrained from revealing his professional name, which you might recognize.
Mrs. Faith Boykin lived well into her nineties. After Theo passed on, she sold her Piedmont County property to a kaolin conglomerate for an undisclosed sum and spent her final days sitting pretty with her sister Lily on Sapelo Island.
To those who never met Theo Boykin, and to those who remember him as a handy fellow who didn’t have much to say, let me say this:
I know Theo Boykin was not the Messiah. He wasn’t the Twelfth Imam or the Second Coming, either, although some of us sure enough prayed, year after year, for his return. Theo was simply a very intelligent and creative young man—the smartest person in Piedmont County—until ignorance and bigotry cut him down to size. Nobody knows how many like him have been taken from us, long before we ever got a chance to name a street or a high school after them. Even Arnie Lumpkin could see that he was in no way superior to Theo Boykin. What Arnie and plenty of other folks couldn’t do was admit they could see that. That’s the secret that everybody knows: We are not superior. We know very well that the Almighty has no particular wish for us, whoever we are, to prevail. That’s the secret folks will guard with their lives. The one they’ll lynch and burn and bomb for.
Here in Baghdad, Georgia, I believe we have to thank both Theo Boykin and Miss Grace Spivey for bringing that secret to our attention. And May? My sister May brought more believers into the world with one night of storytelling than the Reverends Stokes and Whitlock did in a lifetime—and they were professionals in that line.
When my in-box got out of hand recently, one of my former fifth-graders—thank you, Tavonte Smith—helped me put together this auto-reply:
Thank you for your interest in Baghdad, Georgia. A good time to come see us in Piedmont County is the second weekend in June.
For the record, I do see your email even if you get this auto-reply. I try to answer your questions in the order they are received, although it is my personal philosophy that life is way too short to spend it all in front of a computer screen. Furthermore, I am now of an age where we have to face the possibility that some questions may go unanswered.
For updates, “visit” our website, www.baghdadbazaarGA.com.
You need that GA in there or you wind up in Iraq.